flâneur

When Reason Fails | The Point Magazine

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In a country where the random slaughter of children is so common that it’s been integrated into the structure of ordinary life, literary culture simply has nothing to say on the subject.

Nobody lived in this Texas. From one horizon to the other, the entire flat landscape was a mess of tangled freeways; forty-lane, fifty-lane; screaming metal in the sunshine, bright green fringes of grass. Every so often—near a big interchange, usually—there would be a huge slab of blue glass, a forty-story building: a hospital. This Texas was only freeways and hospitals, and I was at a hospital. Someone I knew was in there, and she was dying, but there was nothing I could do except sit in the air-conditioned waiting room as doctors and nurses ran around in panic behind plate glass and the traf

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